out of reach

The day I met David was my first time volunteering after college. I’d walked into the homework center nestled between a Boys and Girls Club and a health clinic in a community center associated with a low-income housing project across the street, and I’d been directed into a classroom and toward this fourth grader, whom the Program Director had asked to show me around. He shook my hand and introduced himself as he walked me through the three classrooms, explaining which grade levels each served. Ours was for fourth and fifth graders, at the time, and later also for middle schoolers; and there, in that room, I would sit surrounded by students one or two nights a week for five years. I’d work on homework and study skills with a handful of kids; and I’d introduce them to poetry and politics and some of the history or geography I was editing at work. Over the years I tutored a handful of students who all seemed to know and never seemed to mind that David would always get my attention most. It had been so simple, his winning me over within just a few minutes that first night. He’d taken me through the classrooms and then into the computer lab, where his eyes had lit up. “These are our computers,” he told me, “they were a gift.” There were sixteen of them, all purple iMacs, and they looked pristine. “Every night I clean up in here,” he’d explained as he pulled out a duster, then swabbed at each keyboard and pushed in each chair. “These were a gift from MIT,” he’d told me, “so we have to take care of them.” And then he’d walked around the circle of computers and shut down each one, squaring the mouse up on each mouse pad as he passed.

This ten-year-old was responsible, he was compassionate, and he showed such great respect. But as I sat with him so regularly and worked with him through assignments, I saw determination and frustration intermixed. Memorizing was hard for him, multiplication a beast. We’d chant and we’d sing and we’d repeatrepeatrepeat, but it took many months for those multiplication tables to lock in. He hated how much more time he had to spend on math than other kids; yet he stayed focused, turned his eyes wide toward me and listened to everything I said. He stayed focused, he pushed himself, and one day, after I’d tried visually depicting division as many ways as I could, he took the pencil from my hand and redrew something I’d done. Near where I’d created apples he made a row of small tick marks, then circled them in batches as I had shown him so many times. He looked up at me, expectant, and found me grinning and probably a little teary eyed to boot.

The next week he was too excited to start homework right away; he had to tell me something; he wanted me to know. He’d shown his teacher the way he could draw out each division problem and solve it, and she’d asked him to redo one on the board in front of the class. He had never kept up with the other students before; now he’d gone and taught division to the entire class.

I will never forget his face that day, as he told me how good that felt; nor the time he asked if he could read one of the textbooks I’d been working on, and did read it, and then told me which parts he liked best; nor the moment, years later, when without any hesitation he emailed me his first Shakespeare paper and asked me for help. I’d moved to San Francisco by then, just a month into his freshman year of high school, and he knew how to reach me and I knew we’d stay in touch; but realizing that he wanted me to keep tutoring him was one of the most poignant learning moments of my life. The homework center aimed to help low-income students academically; but what David showed me as he sent me every iteration of every English and history paper he wrote over the next four years was that the experience had bred in him that same love of learning that I regularly wish all schooling was about. David always wanted to make his work meaningful; to engage with his readings and have something to say about it that made sense. He had a strong affinity for issues related to justice and personal offense; he reveled in sharing that with old William, in writing about Shylock and Iago with the same seriousness he pondered the civil rights movement and the history of his parents’ native Haiti and the plight of families in the ghetto, as he referred to his housing project both while and after he lived in it. He always wanted to make the world meaningful, to consider things carefully and then craft out his clearest thoughts.

This summer David will turn nineteen; next week he’ll become a high school graduate. His face has thinned, his cheek structure hardened, but he still looks at me, when I visit, with a youthful trust and faith in his eyes. Two years ago when I saw him for the first time after leaving Cambridge, he was so clearly a teenager, with a handsome grin, a deep, rich-toned voice, and a sturdier handshake than that first one he gave me when he was just ten; but he still hugged me and held on for a very long time. When I left that day, I couldn’t help but hug him again and tell him I love him, and he said with no hesitation the same thing. This boy, now a young man, is like a brother to me; he’s like family; but he’s also something else. He’s my muse, my motivation, the driving force behind my (hopeful) career shift. He and his siblings and classmates and that homework center are why I want to fill this country with great programming for low-income kids; because there are thousands of young people out there who love learning and will work hard at it and yet no one invests in them or gives them much to work with. David is with me in every class I take at Stanford, in every hour I have spent tutoring or teaching creative writing to kids. (He even asked about my west coast tutees, checking in on them, big brotherly.) David is with me in the college awareness program I have volunteer run the past few years, and he is with me especially in every class session and reading for a course I’m taking on postsecondary access. Today he is with me louder and clearer than ever before because today we have spent a long time on the phone talking—for the third or fourth time in recent weeks—about financial aid and student loans and future earnings and not knowing, neither one of us, how to figure this out. David’s family has moved out of public housing; his parents must now earn enough to not be deemed low-income because even with seven children they did not qualify for a Pell Grant, did not qualify for all the financial aid for college that we had thought. And college is on the table now, as David has finally been accepted despite his continued difficulties in math, his persistent struggles with grammar, spelling, and syntax in writing, and his resulting low GPA and SAT score. I was not sure David would get into a four-year college because on paper he has not excelled to the extent that in person it is so clear he has; and yet three colleges have interviewed and accepted him, I trust because his commitment to hard work and his passion for learning and doing and being involved in the world around him are all too evident to anyone he meets. He wins others over so easily in person; he is one of those young people that many adults cannot forget.

David has struggled and he has conquered and yet he may still not get to go to four-year college because the cost is just too much for his large and not well-off family. I came to Stanford wanting to make sure that every young person would get the same supports that have benefited David so much; yet in two weeks I will leave it unsure that even that is enough; because all this hard work and focus feels a bit like a tease when the price tag on the American dream is out of reach.